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Poetry book reviews

Most contemporary Canadian books of poetry tend to be free verse, but lately a number of poets are turning to traditional forms. Here are three recent standouts in that mode.

Toronto poet laureate George Elliott Clarke’s Illicit Sonnets (Eyewear Publishing, 92 pages, $20.99) is loosely modeled on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, her celebrated series of uber-romantic poems addressed to fellow poet (and eventual husband) Robert Browning. However, Clarke’s sensibilities are far from those of his Victorian predecessor. As he puts it in the first poem, “These poems are about her, naked, and I, nude./I’m not flaccid, and she’s no prude.”

Clarke’s imaginary lovers are Salim and Laila, and they are both given voice. Their affair crosses racial and generational lines: he’s black, while she has “searing Nordic looks” and is an “elderessa.” Some poems are loftily ardent: when Salim first glimpses Laila, “A flood of sun/Instantly shut out shade. Did I stagger?/The floor tilted — or swayed.” The poems eventually get rapturously raunchy, though in this age of 50 Shades of Grey, not shockingly so. Clarke is a playful stylist, and here he displays an exuberant lust for language as well as for the pleasures of the flesh. In fact, though, the most intriguing poems are those in which he wrestles with the difficulty of finding words to embody physical ecstasy. As he writes in the final poem, from Salim’s point of view, “what we must say/In the moment’s heat, is said this one way.”

Robert Melançon’s For as Far as the Eye Can See (Biblioasis, 152 pages, $16.95) is a fluid English translation (by Judith Cowan) of the Quebec poet’s Le Paradis des apparences, published in 2004. In this series of meditative “light sonnets” (composed of four three-line stanzas), the poet chronicles the “tiny happenings” of an ordinary neighbourhood, as the seasons come and go, people and animals (including birds and squirrels) pass through, and days go by.

Some of the moments and observations may seem slight on their own, but they have a cumulative power, and in the end, the quotidian seems elevated to a kind of holiness. Melançon’s exquisite descriptions bring the setting alive: he writes of trees that “become columns, holding aloft //the dome of heaven between walls of wind” and windows whose squares of light “cast/glimmering nets that may catch a face.” He brings to shimmering life the “tiny realities//that every instant’s made of.”

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Newfoundland poet Mary Dalton makes radical use of an age-old form in Hooking (Signal Editions, 96 pages, $18). The cento is a kind of patchwork poem made up of lines from other poets; it’s meant to pay tribute to the source material, and was popular in Ancient Greece. Dalton imposes an added condition on herself: each cento’s line has the same position in the original poems, so “Gauze,” for instance, is composed of the fourth line from work by writers as varied as Sylvia Plath and Leonard Cohen. (All the sources are listed in a section at the back of the book.)

Dalton’s stitch work is very fine: it makes for some strange juxtapositions, but they are often as evocative as they are enigmatic. In effect, the collection as a whole is a celebration of creation, and subtly links writing to other products of human making, such as cloth, braids, lace, filaments and thread, all of which are mentioned in the poems. At their best, the strung-together lines and phrases have a new, arresting beauty: “Dark now, the air a factory black/above the sea’s whisper and the seashore./Who was it said time is an engine of cogs and gears?”

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